A Palatial Complex in Northern Thailand, With Room for Mao

Marc Faber’s office, planned as a space to display some of his Mao Zedong memorabilia, includes two 14-meter teakwood trunks next to a dual staircase.CreditMike Ives

By Mike Ives

Aug. 20, 2015

CHIANG MAI, Thailand — In the late 1970s, Marc and Supatra Faber lived in a 1,700-square-foot Hong Kong apartment. It was large by the crowded city’s standards, he said, but he still felt cramped.

Mr. Faber, an investment adviser from Switzerland and editor of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, a financial newsletter, longed for a second home where he could find peace and quiet, he said. He was also looking for a large space to display the Mao Zedong posters and trinkets that he was busy collecting in mainland China.

“I said to myself, ‘It’s a pity to have this all in warehouses,”’ Mr. Faber said of his Mao collection, which now includes about 3,000 posters and 33,000 buttons with images of the Chinese Communist revolutionary leader. “‘I’d like to display it because, to some extent, it’s a historical document.”’

Mr. Faber said he has a special affinity for Chiang Mai, a northern Thai city with nearly one million people in its metropolitan area. He cites its green space, an international airport and a temperate climate by Southeast Asian standards. Ms. Faber also has relatives in Chiang Mai. So around the time of the couple’s marriage, in 1981, they bought some land there.

But Mr. Faber, who has built a career on canny investments in emerging markets, told his wife that he would eventually like to buy property along Chiang Mai’s riverfront, too, if any landed on the market at the right price.

He waited until 1999, when the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 had taken its toll on Chiang Mai’s real estate market. The couple bought a riverside property, in Ms. Faber’s name, for the equivalent of $250,000 at the exchange rate at the time.

The property, which measures about 8,000 square meters, or two acres, had two existing homes. The couple decided to use one — a well-preserved example of traditional Thai architecture — as their residence.

The two-level, roughly 400-square-meter, or 4,300-square-foot, home, which sits in the shade of a rain tree, has a shingled exterior, peaked roof cornices and clear views of the Ping River.

Before the couple moved in, Ms. Faber asked some workers to reconfigure the layout on the second level by shrinking the communal rooms and expanding the three bedrooms. The workers also installed stainless-steel cabinets and appliances, mostly Italian, in a ground-floor kitchen. “The Thai house looks very old-fashioned,” Ms. Faber said recently in a telephone interview. “But inside, in the kitchen, it’s all modern.”

The couple moved to Chiang Mai from Hong Kong in 2000, Mr. Faber recalled. He ordered the second home on the property demolished and drew up plans for its replacement: a concrete building of about 400 square meters, 25 meters high, with five-meter ceilings, walls 40 centimeters, or 16 inches, thick, wooden furniture and trimmings, tree trunks soaring through the living space and a bright-red exterior paint job.

Mr. Faber hired a Chiang Mai architect, Chulathat Kitibur, to help with measurements and building permits. He explained that the ground level was to have one enormous room, which he would use as an office and a place to display some of his Mao memorabilia.

The second level would be used for a floor-to-ceiling poster gallery and a guest bedroom, Mr. Faber said, and the third would be a library for some of his first-edition books by Adam Smith, Karl Marx and other economic luminaries.

Image

The building housing Mr. Faber’s office includes a floor-to-ceiling poster gallery and a first-edition library.CreditMike Ives

He decided that all the wood in the building would be teak, a luxury hardwood native to Southeast Asia, and that its second level would include space for a 3.5-meter, or 11.5-foot, wooden Buddha statue he had purchased in Myanmar. The construction team would also need to build a 2.5-meter-tall wooden door for the front entrance and then install a similarly oversize church door from India, which Mr. Faber had purchased from a Chiang Mai antiques dealer, for a side entrance.

Before the roof was set in place, a crane carried two 14-meter teakwood trunks into the ground-level office, where they were positioned beside a dual staircase that leads to the second level.

But Mr. Faber said that to his amazement, the construction team built the rest of his palatial office with a “toolbox smaller than my briefcase.”

Construction wrapped up in 2002, and the cost of labor, design and materials came to about a million dollars, primarily because Mr. Faber had purchased so much teak from three local wood dealers, he said.

Ms. Faber, who now spends about a week per month in Chiang Mai, and the rest at her condominium in Bangkok, the Thai capital, said that the office project had been entirely her husband’s idea and that she was pleased with the result.

Tourists occasionally stop at the office’s wooden church door, she added, to ask if it is a house of worship.

“I say, ‘Yes, I had to build a church for my husband to confess,”’ Ms. Faber said with a laugh.

On a recent weekday afternoon in Chiang Mai, rays of sunlight dappled a lawn under the Fabers’ giant rain tree. A hot breeze blew off the Ping River, but the temperature inside Mr. Faber’s thickly insulated office was a few degrees cooler. Mr. Faber, 69, sat beside a towering bookshelf, wearing jeans and a black tank top and typing on a laptop in a room without air-conditioning. He told a visitor that the five-meter ceilings allowed hot air to escape toward the roof.

Mr. Faber said that he spends about 20 percent of his time in Chiang Mai. He has an office in Hong Kong and a villa at the Nam Hai, a luxury resort in central Vietnam where he is a co-investor, but he spends the bulk of his time traveling for business.

“Some people buy van Goghs and Renoirs and Gauguins” for entertainment and relaxation, Mr. Faber said. “I like to watch nature, basically — trees, or flowers and so forth — because it moves all the time, depending on the seasons. And because I’m traveling so much, when I’m not traveling, I like to be on my own.”

But as Mr. Faber spoke, images of Mao Zedong stared at him from the hundreds of buttons, posters and ceramic busts that filled the room.

He said his impulse to collect Chinese Communist propaganda is rooted in his childhood, when he spent time at his grandparents’ hotel in Engelberg, Switzerland, and discovered that there was a market in vintage advertisements and skiing posters.

“When I moved to Hong Kong and Mao was still alive, in ’73, I thought, ‘Once he dies they will not produce this garbage anymore,”’ Mr. Faber recalled, laughing.

The entire collection is now worth at least $3 million, he said, and people often ask if he is still looking for new pieces.